31
Jan 09
Seeqpod is a great website for finding free music on the web quickly. They offer an API which allows web developers (like me) to create websites and applications which access Seeqpod’s database. I recently created a website, called Freemusic, which allows users to access Seeqpod’s music in a much more user friendly way. Users can share direct links to playlists they’ve created using the site. And all of the music can easily be downloaded from the original source that Seeqpod found it in.
Here’s a screenshot of the site:
Lastly, I feel like it needs to be said that the site itself stores no music files or indexes of the locations of music files on the internet. It merely is an engine for querying the Seeqpod database. If a user finds a song in Seeqpod’s database which has been uploaded to the internet without permission of the copyright holder, then this user should not download or listen to this song.
<nerd talk>
The site uses the following technologies: javascript, ajax, php, seeqpod api, and the jw flash player.
</nerd talk>
Tags: ajax, api, flash, jquery, jw flash player, mp3, Music, php
Posted in Music, Software, Web Development | 4 Comments »
02
Jan 09
Screenshot of http://polymath.mit.edu/music/player
A few weeks ago I set out to design a new website to showcase some of the music I’ve composed and had performed over the last two years. As with any website, I wanted to make sure it would be easily update-able. So I decided to use the very popular JW (Jeroen Wijering) Flash Media Player in order to take advantage of its ability to play XSPF (XML (Extensible Markup Language) Shareable Playlist Format) playlists. (Don’t you just love it when acronyms get compounded!) I’ve used the JW Flash player before for the Vi / deo site I made last summer. However, since a new version of the player had just been released, rather than use a similar implementation to the one over at Vi / deo, I decided instead to start from scratch, in order to take advantage of three key new features in the player.
JW Flash Player New Features
1. Support for Skinning
I designed my own skin, based on the Modieus (or “Stylish”) skin from Jeroen. The main improvements I made to the skin were customizing the look of the playlist items, so that each would not take up much vertical space. This makes the skin more suitable for music playlists. (It was originally intended more for video playlists.) The skin I made is available at Jeroen’s site here. You can also grab it here, just be aware of the license information found at Jeroen’s new site, Longtail Video.
2. New and Improved Javascript Interaction
The way I used this will be apparent in the site itself. The main feature I use is the ability to change the page’s content (the stuff displayed on the right-hand side) based on the current song being played by the player.
I do this by adding an event listener to the player’s ITEM event.
<script type="text/javascript">
var player;
function playerReady(obj) {
player = document.getElementById(obj['id']);
player.addControllerListener('ITEM','onPlaylistItemChange');
};
function onPlaylistItemChange(event) {
//handle event
}
</script>
3. Plugins
There’s a really cool audio visualization plugin called Revolt. You just have to see it. It’s awesome.
The new music player site can be found at http://polymath.mit.edu/music/player/.
The xspf playlist which drives the site is here.
The Modieus_Slim skin that I made can be found here. (zip folder containing .fla, .swf, and other supporting files)
Tags: api, flash, javascript, jw flash player, Music, original, revolt plugin
Posted in Music, Personal, Web Development | 8 Comments »